Following The Beekeeper, The Bricklayer and more, Dennis Quaid and Jean Reno are to star in the occupation-based action flick, The Florist.
Have you ever wanted to see Dennis Quaid repeatedly hit a man in the face with a bunch of daffodils? If so, there’s potentially good news on the horizon. The Jaws 3 star has teamed up with Leon and Godzilla actor Jean Reno for an action thriller called The Florist.
Directed by London Has Fallen's Babak Najafi, The Florist recently wrapped filming, and, according to Deadline, its protagonist is a chap named Carl Rikker (Quaid), an “introverted, quiet horticulturalist” who’s also an assassin. Trouble beckons when he “forms an unlikely friendship with a teenage girl.”
Quaid is therefore set to join Jason Statham, Aaron Eckhart, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Ben Affleck in a growing phenomenon we’ve previously dubbed the occupation-based action genre. The success of John Wick in 2014 has, over the past decade, seen other filmmakers rush to make action thrillers about people with innocent-sounding jobs that are a cover for their true, bone-breaking nature.
As a result, we’ve had Statham appear as an ass-kicking apiarist in The Beekeeper, Eckhart in mortar-and-mayhem thriller The Bricklayer, and Van Damme as an assassin and grounds keeper in The Gardener.
The collision of gardening and murder seems to be particularly appealing for screenwriters in particular. As well as The Gardener and the newly-announced Florist, Paul Schrader – who may have inadvertently triggered the whole genre with 1977’s Taxi Driver – wrote and directed 2022’s Master Gardener, in which Joel Edgerton played a horticulturalist with a dark history. That was more of a slow-burn drama than a thriller, though, admittedly.
Recent months have also seen Ben Affleck return with his guns and QuickBooks subscription for The Accountant 2, while Bond director Martin Campbell has recently made the action thriller Cleaner, in which Daisy Ridley stars as an ex-soldier who becomes embroiled in a terrorist plot while she’s cleaning windows one day.
As for The Florist, it’s already secured distribution in various territories, and will be shown off at the Cannes Film Festival later this month. Filming took place in New York and New Jersey earlier this year, while the production company behind it, Film Bridge International, describes it as a “bold, high energy action thriller with real emotional stakes.”
The Florist is expected to emerge in early 2026.
